We are currently witnessing a strong worldwide push toward bringing fiber closer to individual homes and businesses. The emerging FTTX access networks will move the bandwidth bottleneck from the first/last mile toward metropolitan and wide area networks, creating a need for efficient optical-switching mechanisms. In this article, we review the current trends in optical switching that help to improve the bandwidth efficiency, as well as to decrease the cost and power consumption of next-generation optical networks. Our review provides an overview of the optical switching domain and facilitates the understanding of newly emerging switching techniques and their interpretation as derivatives of the presented main optical switching trends.
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